Recent queries:
* Is the english channel wider now than when the romans crossed it, due to erosion and sea level rise?
(Conclusion... probably, but nobody seems to have researched this) * Write me some python to output gcode using a gcode library.
(Gave me examples with a few different libraries, because 'gcody' that I was using before seems to have been unmaintained too long) * What is the name of the drink that everyone used to drink at makerspaces
(Club Mate - but google didn't seem to know) * Write me brief python code to calculate how often 9 tosses of a biased coin has more heads than tails. The coin returns heads with probability p.
(gave me the answer far quicker than writing the code from scratch) * give me a nmap commandline to get lots of info about an ip address
(far quicker than reading the manpage to figure out how to turn on all the tests/checks available)Initially it gave me answers that didn't work. Then I realised the API I was asking it to generate code for was updated in the last year so it was basically useless.
Then I asked it some more general coding questions and it went on an unprompted rant about how I should speak to it "politely".
I explained this is how I talk in real life and that I said absolutely nothing insulting to it. I also reminded it that as a language model it should not have biases or opinions on this stuff anyway. It agreed with me.
I then asked it another question and it refused to answer because I included some profanity in the question. I think it literally replied with, "I will not answer this".
Don't think I'm going to use it for a while after that. Fucked me right off. I get enough of this shit in real life. I have absolutely no interest being moralised to by an AI chat bot.
Edit: I've shared the transcript below if you want a laugh. It's a bit different from how I recalled it above.
Can you share the prompt that led to this? I agree this sounds pretty disconcerting.
Also, looking back at it now I probably should have just ignored its attempt to moralise instead of questioning it.
My best recent use of Bing is while on vacation to Italy, I had it search the internet in Italian for more locally focused information, then auto translate and summarize the results into English. I also used it to explain italian culture and history to me right in the moment.
It was amazing how prevalent silly/embarrassing questions were. Things like "can kissing cause baby?"
I use it for queries where I can quickly tell if the answer is BS or not, like code snippets or language related queries (e.g. when I can't find a word, or when I want synonyms).
I still use it sometimes for trivial stuff like giving me recipe or travel inspiration (using the web search API), but I haven't been using it for any sort of algorithms/coding stuff.
It's useful for tasks which have a high tolerance for not being completely correct. Which is definitely a subset of all tasks that interest me, but it's a smaller subset that I originally thought it would be. It's just really hard to find out where the models are wrong when it's a complex question. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't need the tool, I guess.
This is for non current-events type searches. I'd probably have Bing AI in my toolset if that was more of the type of thing I was typically searching for.
I'm in the cohort of users whose usage flatlined. I had a lot of fun asking it all kinds of stuff for a while, but — sometime around all the hubbub of whether or not OpenAI uses your interactions as training data — I just stopped entirely.